Long time ago, I was extremely excited when SVG was introduced and first implementations in browsers (excepting IE, of course) started to show the potential of documents enriched with SVG: Animations, diagrams that looks quite professional without having the need of high resolution bitmaps, etc.

Thanks to the reluctance of MS, available documentation rich in SVG is quite limited and I think it is a shame. Many graphical objects in webpages could be represent by a vector representation with the advantage of requiring much less space in servers and requiring less bandwidth. By example, a SVG object (such as an ellipse) with a nice color gradient takes a few hundred of bytes of coding. The size of the code remains practically the same for a tiny ellipse covering a few hundreds of pixels on the screen or the full page, and both of them look beautiful.

Years have passed and maybe finally we'll see a shift in how new web content will be created. SVG is not ideal for everything that is graphics, but definitively it will help to have webpages showing much more efficient graphical content. For once, thanks MS for getting late to the date, at least you got there.